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Looking at FreeBSD 6 and Beyond
Provataki writes "OSNews published an interview with core FreeBSD developers John Baldwin, Robert Watson and Scott Long. They discuss about the upcoming FreeBSD 6 and its new features, the competition, TrustedBSD, Darwin and much more."
From the article:
The TrustedBSD Audit support originated in large part from Mac OS X, and we really appreciate Apple's work with us to develop audit support, and their support in getting it out into open source. One of the outcomes of this will be our (TrustedBSD's) continuing maintainership of OpenBSM, a bundling of the libraries, documentation, and command line tools, which will be portable across a host of operating systems including FreeBSD, Darwin, and Linux. This sort of arrangement can be a strong motivator for companies like Apple to release software under open source -- we're already preparing bundles of documentation and feature enhancements that we hope they will be able to adopt back into Mac OS X.
I'm glad Apple is helping out, but I was hoping they would go more into the BSD kernel api that's appearing in Tiger.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the Linux community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: Linux is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:
.005% of internet servers. This led to Mandrakesoft, makers of another troubled distro, to purchase Connectiva and become Mandriva. However, industry anaylists say that this will not help since Mandriva is already a shell of its former self.
Fact: Linux has balkanized yet again. There are now no less than 140 separate, competing Linux distros, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other distros, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project (except for Redhat and Novell/Suse): fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.
Fact: The trivial issue os what to call Linux continues to hound Linux. At a recent Linux conference in San Francisco, a fight broke out between RMS (Richard M. Stallman) who says Linux should be called GNU/Linux and Linus Torvalds who created Linux and says that Linux should be called Linux. This led to a massive barroom style brawl involving at least 150 Linux geeks. The SFPD was called out to break up the melee, and arrested 150 people. It was estimated that at least 2 to 3 times that many were involved in the brawl, but there wasn't enough police on hand to arrest or count all of them. Sixty one people were hospitalized as a result of this brawl, and one person is still in a coma. Another three people had to get their jaws wired shut.
Fact: Linux is plagued by a lack of professionalism. The stereotype of Linux users being fat unwashed dateless geeks who still live in their parents' basements and refuse to shower more than once a month is all too true. The best example of this is RMS who claims to have a "water phobia" and thus rarely bathes. RMS also looks like he has been living in a cave for the last 5 years. In fact, RMS has been arrested twice because he has been mistaken for Osama Bin Laden. While RMS has always been found to not be Osama Bin Laden, it has created a perception of that Linux is the "terrorist operating system". Linus Torvalds has been forced to spend a great deal of time correcting this perception instead of working on the Linux kernel. Alan Cox quit Linux kernel development since he got tired of everyone saying that he was a terrorist.
Fact: There are almost no Connectiva developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled
Fact: X.org will not include support for Redhat's Fedora project. The newly formed group believes that Fedora has strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with other Linux distros and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."
Fact: Ubuntu Linux, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered Debian "distro", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing. It also doesn't help that most people think the word, "Ubuntu", is an obscure term for a homosexual orgy." Netcraft reports that Ubuntu Linux is run on exactly 0% of internet servers. An attempt to save Ubuntu by creating a derivative distro called Kubuntu has also failed.
Fact: Debian Linux, which claims to focus on "being free" (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for Linux use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our Debian boxes ou
There should be a special FreeBSD 6.6.6 release with the demon/daemon emphasized.
FreeBSD 5 was the first FreeBSD major version that actually worked properly on my laptop. I'm really excited about FreeBSD 6. Possibly the best feature will be the inclusion of WPA for 802.11. Everything seemed to work on my Thinkpad when I was hardwired, but wireless support was TERRIBLE in FreeBSD 5. Having native drivers for wireless adapters, as well as WPA support will make a transition to FreeBSD full-time on my laptop possible. The only other thing I could really ask for would be an easy-to-use DVD transcoder. I've used most of the packages out there for *nix, but they're still in their infancy. It won't be too long before they're ready for prime-time.
I enjoy FreeBSD a lot, it is a great OS and it's fun to use, and I'd like to thank everyone involved.
:)
Having said that, there are a few areas where FreeBSD sadly lacks behind Linux. For example, support for USB 2.0 is flakey, devices often don't work or behave oddly, and if you have atapicam compiled into the kernel, good luck with your iPod (firewire works flawlessly, though).
Another thing is WPA, there's no support for it in the stable branches, only in -CURRENT. I find support for USB 2.0 and WPA to be very important for an OS 2005, and frankly, support for both should be taken for granted, I think.
Other than that, it's a great OS and I am looking forward to 6.0. And I encourage everyone who is unfamiliar with FreeBSD to try it out - you might love it.
This reminds me: I recently got a shiny new hard drive and am going to put a bunch of partitions at the end. I was recently reminded of FreeBSD, and I'm gonna include that alongside Mandrake and Ubuntu (and whatever BeOS is left these days).
Are there any other major BSD distros, or is it just these guys? And what non-linux, non-BSD OSes are around now? (I hear OS X is due to be leaked for x86 any day now).
Are Linux and Free/OpenBSD the only real options now?
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Yeah. She made internet history with the intensity and brutality of all the flamewars she provoked. I will miss that. :)
Why should I use FreeBSD over Solaris 10?
Linux and the associated cloud of distros are like an English garden - mad experiments in all corners, and a mostly clear middle.
FreeBSD is like the lawn of the commanding officer at Camp Pendleton. Each blade the same distance from the blades around it, all the same height, and if one should slip out of place someone comes and corrects this quickly.
I love the flow of cool GPL stuff ending up in
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Why do people write poetry or write stories? You do it for the love of it. It is your passion and your hard work that you want to show the world. To me it is a form of artistic expression. That's why there are some many flavors of Linux and BSD.
Why should Apple care?
Because mac os x shares code with freebsd, and helping freebsd will help themselves?
The SMPVFS work is a task to add fine-grained locking to the VFS layer of the kernel as well as the UFS and nullfs filesystems.
I don't hate FreeBSD, but this is one proof of how bad has been the 5.x release. 5.x was suposed to be the SMP-friendly version, but a piece of code so important as the VFS is, is still under a single-lock kind of locking. I mean, I can imagine how BAD freebsd 5.x must be in filesystem-intesive workloads in SMP systems
I mean, what have they been doing all those years? Freebsd 5.x took a lot of time, this kind of optimization should have been done already.
There is a PC operating system revolution in the making. In the next few years we will see a display of software battlery like never before. Mac OS X will be available on x86-based PCs, and FreeBSD 6.0 will be released. Solaris 11 promises to be perhaps the greatest true UNIX workstaton release ever. The new offerings from Mandriva, based on Debian rather than RedHat, will surely be amongst the top of their class. And of course there will (maybe) be the release of Longhorn.
With the advent of multicored CPUs, the level of concurrent performance will explode. OSes like Linux, FreeBSD 6.0, Solaris 10 and 11, and Mac OS X will be prepared for that change. They will be able to effectively take advantage of the first generation of multicore PC CPUs. There are questions as to whether Longhorn will be able to cut it in the New Computing Order that will soon be upon us.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Welcome to Slashdot!
:)
Please refrain from using the played out jokes seen elsewhere on Slashdot, you would do particularly well not mentioning "in soviet russia...", "xyz is dying" and "imagine a beowulf cluster of these!" in the future
The reason I say this is simple: you will very quickly have a friend to foe ratio that simply does not work in your favour
-- If I were a fish, I'd be wet
I'm not sure if this is even worth mentioning, but there is Apple's Darwin. I know nothing about it so I can't tell you more, but the site seems to be http://developer.apple.com/darwin/ and it does have install CDs.
Maybe someone else can tell us ups and downs of using Darwin?
The space unintentionally left unblank.
Well, BSD has been along for a long time, since the late 1970s. In fact, here is the Berkeley copyright notice for FreeBSD:
Compare that history to Windows (first released in 1985, although to be fair, Windows development and the release of DOS was in 1981), and to GNU/Linux (GNU project started in 1984, Linux started in 1991). Now, BSD has been freely available for just about the same time as Linux, though. Read your history before you start flaming.
Secondly, the BSDs have a nice level of integration between the kernel and the userland, since the developers work on both parts. For example, the BSD developers work on the kernel, the userland, the C library, the manual pages, etc. The only parts that aren't developed by the BSDs are the C compiler (from GNU) and a handful of other GNU utilities. This is different from Linux, in which the kernel is developed by Linus and contributors, while the userland is developed mainly by the GNU project.
Finally, the BSDs have proven themselves over the last 25+ years that they are very stable and capable operating systems, with a lot of merit. BSD was the first operating system to implement TCP/IP. BSD was a major commercial player back in the days of 4.3BSD and the VAX, and it does behind the scenes work in many of the non-BSD operating systems that people use (e.g., the core of Mac OS X and many Windows networking tools). BSD was one of the first pieces of software that went from closed-source to open-source (but not without a fight from AT&T, which explains why Linux, and not BSD, seems to be more popular).
BSD is a very nice operating system, and developers like working on it because it is well engineered and is proven. Read some BSD history and try a BSD before you start flaming.
Documentation does seem to be one of the greatest strengths of the BSDs, noone involved in actual projects for Linux and GNU stuff bother to document - they need to start up seperate projects for it.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
http://www.zejn.si/~natan/666.html 'Bill Gates 666' in Google gives me 129,000 matches. Of course it's using Ascii, not Hebrew letters as it should be. Another great Gates/Anti-Christ page is (even has that old Excel '95 easter egg:
http://egomania.nu/gates.html
What Slashdotter doesn't know this by heart?
Get your Unix fortune now!
This made my day. My favorite distro is finally important enough to be used in a "Linux is dead" post by a BSD troll. Go Ubuntu.
Open Source Sushi
The reason BSD continues to exist is that, despite what capitalism assumes, not all people are assholes who feel the need to own and control everything. If I write software and release it under as BSD license, and then come company uses it, is my software any worse off? Of course not. However, people now do have one more avenue to take if for some reason I stop developing my version, or if the commercial version advances at a more rapid pace. The GPL on the other hand somehow assumes that a company using open code to benefit themselves, and hence making better software available to everyone, is a bad thing, because people are making money off of it. Any company with good intentions is going to give back to the community (see the first comment in this thread about Apple). Any company without an interest in helping out won't use GPL code anyway, so the argument that GPL is the only way to encourage contributions is silly. In fact, if not for the BSD license, FreeBSD wouldn't be benefiting from Apple's contributions at all!
BSD works because not everyone is an asshole. The fact that you're shocked it does work is a testament to the terrible state our world is in today. Modern economic theory is an idiotic, self-fulfulling prophesy.
The difference between Linux and the BSDs is that all bazillion Linux distros basically run the same kernel. Use the same drivers. Have the same memory manager. With the BSD systems, each one is distinct. They do share code, however the kernels are very different from each other. Unlike RMS, I feel an OS is defined by it's kernel, drivers, and memory manager, process scheduler, things like that (It's Linux not GNU/Linux!). For Linux, those are pretty much all the same on all Linux distros. That's not the case with BSDs. Each BSD really is a separate OS. It's why a merging of all the BSD into one OS is pretty much not possible. The only one I'm not sure of is OpenBSD. It's the only BSD that is a true folk from a previous project (FreeBSD and NetBSD were never on the same trunk, they were both created as separate OS's from the beginning). OpenBSD was a split from NetBSD, so I'm sure the kernel and what not are very similar to Net. However, the claim to fame for OpenBSD was that they do all sorts of fancy code auditing for security purposes. I believe they've changed much at the low levels of the OS. So much so that OpenBSD does not share the same broad platform support that Net does. I do feel Open probably could merge back with Net, however Theo's ego would get in the way. For that reason, I don't think it'll ever happen. I'm probably wrong when I think it, but I look at OpenBSD as being nothing but a tweaked NetBSD. In some ways it's good, but I prefer NetBSD. Compairing the security of both, I really don't see where OpenBSD stands that far above Net, Free, or even Linux.
will FreeBSD be as easy to install as Mac OS X? Or am I the only one who cares?
Why do you assume there is one best for all circumstances? Depending on what you are trying to do sometimes you need different underlying algorithms to get the same result.
NetBSD claims to be best because it runs on everything. That means that have to reject code that uses more memory than a VAX or sun3 system is likely to have. FreeBSD can get some extra speed because they can assume you have more memory.
Look closely at DragonFlyBSD. That project split from FreeBSD not long ago because there are two fundamentally different ways to do SMP. Nobody knows which will be best, and until both are implemented fully we cannot know. There is no choice here but to have two different BSDs, each doing their own things.
OpenBSD exists because the founder is a great programmer, but he cannot get along with anyone else.